Importance of Website Navigation

Imagine an award-winning website. What do you picture? Graphic design? Bells and whistles? Cutting edge templates? Pages that flow one to the next?

What about usability? It’s not as prominent, is it? But if you were on that award winning website, you would expect everything to be easy to find, right?

Navigation is the real hero of web design. Good navigation has to work with all sections, leave no pages behind, give great directions, and blend in seamlessly with the rest of the website. There are many types of navigation- top navigation, side navigation, double navigation (good for sites with multiple sub sites), drop down menus- but the part that always remains the same is that if you want your user experience to be the best it can be, your navigation must be well thought out and organized.

What can good navigation do for me?

Besides structure and basic functions, navigation can also steer consumers in certain directions. For example, if the goal of the website is to promote a new product s, for example, that message should be placed prominently in search and.the audience should be directed to the new location. Effective navigation should keep your audience on your page and never leave them stranded (no orphan pages, please!) Your navigation should also be seamless and aligned with the web design so they both flow and neither detracts from the other.

Though not glamorous, useful, clean, and simple navigation is something we champion… so we encourage you to look at your analytics, your site data, and your intentions… is your navigation really doing all that you hoped? Quite frankly, it really should be that friendly.